


love is

by naienko



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-10
Updated: 2012-04-10
Packaged: 2017-11-03 10:08:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/380227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naienko/pseuds/naienko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If John were to answer Kitty Riley's question honestly, this is what he might say.</p><p>Can be read as either post-Great Game or post-Reichenbach. Spoilers for S1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	love is

What shall I tell you? Shall I tell you what you want to hear, which is that it was love, mad love, at first sight and forever, two halves of a whole?

A whole lot of rubbish.

It's _never_ like that. Not at five, when you first realise girls exist (she wore twin plaits and was missing a front tooth); not at fifteen, when girls stop having cooties and start having breasts (she had a freckle centred between hers and brought her own lunch); not at twenty-five, when you and she are both invincible and armed with the courage of your convictions (her fatigues were more flattering as bedding and she was a better sniper); and, without doubt, not at thirty-five, when I'm worn and wounded and the only woman I talk to doesn't actually hear me.

Attraction? Oh God yes. Like putting your hand in a fire, like birthing a baby in a tent, like every life I ever saved and all the reasons I went to war.

As mesmerising as a deadly snake, as fascinating as a train wreck -- you're right, I couldn't take my eyes off him. But it wasn't love at first sight.

Call it ... protection. The day we met, I shot -- killed -- a man for him. You want to make that something bigger, don't you? But you forget what I was -- what I am.

Doctor.

Soldier.

Both pledged to defend life, in very different ways. So I reconciled the two the way I always do, and chose.

That could never have gone differently. I was always going to shoot the cabbie.

Just as I was always going to try to give -- trade -- my life for his, there at the pool. There was no other way it could have gone.

You think I loved him then.

You're wrong.

That wasn't love, not the way you want to say it. That was a soldier falling on a grenade, a doctor excising a cancer.

I was always going to try to blow up Moriarty with me.

Oh, we knew, afterward. I've seen it before, how people change -- how they _have_ to change, when they make that silent pact, and survive.

It's how I got shot, after all.

He died. I lived.

What kind of justice is that?

So I tried to make the trade even, and in the end Moriarty was still ahead of both of us. And we lived.

Knowing we'd die, with and for and together. It's the only tie I've ever seen that rivals mother and child.

Do I, John Watson, love Sherlock Holmes?

No.

It's beyond love. It transcends that word, transfigures that concept.

We are not two halves of a whole.

We are two wholes becoming something more than both, the single universal scenario where one plus one is greater than two.

* * *

Do I, John Watson, love Sherlock Holmes?

_Oh, God, yes._


End file.
